The Secret US Banking Operations That Fund Suicide Bombers

Good to see rising tech website Pando Daily veering into more general news following its acquisition of Paul Carr’s NSFW Corp. Here Adam Penenberg looks at a New York lawyer’s 10-year battle against the “cash for suicide bombing” industry:

The day before he blew himself up, Bassam Jamal Darwish al-Takruri wore a freshly ironed white shirt, blazer, and shiny shoes, as if he were on his way to a job interview. As he was about to leave home for the last time, his father gave him 10 shekels in pocket money, apparently unaware of his son’s plans.

Takruri, who lived in Hebron, was 18, boyish, thin, and studious – he dreamed of becoming an engineer — with doleful eyes, scratchy eyebrows, and a high, arcing forehead. He traveled to a secret location to record a video announcing his intent to become a “martyr” and offering glory to Allah. “My dear father, my affectionate mother, my dear brothers and sisters, do not say we lost that who is gone,” he said. “If immortality means loss, it is better that you lose me.” He called his death “a cheap price” to pay “for the sake of Allah and Islam,” and begged his family to view it as a day of celebration.

Afterward Takruri met his handler, an operative for Hamas, in Abu Dis, a town bordering Jerusalem and governed by the Palestinian National Authority. It was brushing up against 5 p.m. on May 17, 2003, during the Second Palestinian Intifada, a period of intensified Israeli-Palestinian conflict that had begun two and a half years earlier. The two traveled by taxi four miles north to the handler’s home in Shuafat, where Takruri showed him the explosives vest stowed in his bag. To avoid a last minute change of heart, Takruri, like many suicide bombers, spent the last night of his life away from his family.

At 4 a.m. Takruri and his handler awoke and worked together to fasten a specially designed vest around the bomber’s body. Inside were four separate cylinders, each packed with ball bearings and screws, designed as a pipe bomb, weighing approximately 15 pounds. The explosives were formulated from common household products, a dangerous, unstable mix of acetone, hydrogen peroxide, and hydrochloride acid, a recipe found on the Internet.

They hooked up an activation switch shaped like a doorbell and the size of two matchbooks. Takruri secreted the weapon under clothes the handler had purchased for the occasion: ritual four-cornered undergarment with fringes, black pants, white shirt, long black coat, skullcap, and a Star of David chain, an outfit he figured would be worn by ultra-Orthodox Haredi Jews…

Not just US banks, but most significant players in financial markets can be tagged as players in the game of cash shuffling for terrorism, narco graft, white slavery and more. The hard part of undermining and closing these loopholes in the financial world is that the same blurry routes are used both by governments and NGOs interested in avoiding scrutiny…which means that any attempt to clamp down on the flow of cash is met with stony silence or thinly veiled hostility and organized obfuscation. This ugly reality is at the forefront of opposition to rogue leaks of info and intel…because clear indication of corporations knowingly turning a blind eye to terrorism as long as the funds keep passing through their hands might force a shift of policy that would inconvenience even larger players. We have a war of interests going on quietly about us, between equally greedy factions…governments may like a quiet way to handle cash, but revenue strapped governments also find themselves looking for ways to shut down tax loopholes and errant billions. The amusing part is watching them struggle to find ways to balance-act between the two issues…the desire for more loot above the board, vs the ability to shuffle loot to illegal projects below the board.

Simon Valentine

lost me at “This ugly reality is at the forefront of opposition to rogue leaks of info and intel…” … possibly because i don’t need converted to a point of view, i already now criminal bastards are criminal bastards … that said, i can see that [quoted area] more as a turning moment for the following information regarding order/procedure .. as a sort of “we know it’s a male behind the curtain in the emerald city” .. and i’m thinking of a balance act too. personal and non-personal. private and public. if any sane system of equilibrium is to be built and followed, it’ll involve those concepts more then it will involve “equality”, which is more of a thing for equation-pushers. looking at it like it’s a horse betting investigation is a fairly practical private matter, however, the public hostility goes a bit further than categorically “obvious criminals”.

looking at justice as another form of organized crime is simple to some, mind boggling to others. point is, if there’s something that can’t be deleted, like old Ben says … well … “blah blah sense blah blah will you sign here”.

BuzzCoastin

what’s the punchline?
homeland banks are nefarious organizations?!

money creats a love for money
and the love of money is the root of oil evil